What is the difference between SATA hard drive and a normal one? ?

Question

What is the difference between SATA hard drive and a normal one? ?

Answer 1

There are a few differences.

The main difference is the speed difference. SATA (Serial ATA) is far faster than standard IDE hard drives. SATA transfers data to a hard drive or other device at 150 mbps where as an IDE drive transfers data at just 100 mbps. There is now a new version of SATA known as SATA2/SATAII. This transfers data and 300 mbps. The faster the transfer rate then the better performance you will get.

The other differences is the method of hooking up the hard drive to the motherboard. A different cable is needed for the data cable. Some SATA hard drives also have a different shaped power connector.

In a nut shell SATA is a lot faster with SATA2 being double the speed.

Answer 2

It's a different (newer) connection between the motherboard and the hard drive. SATA cables are thin compared to the ribbon cables used by IDE (normal) drives.

The SATA connection is theoretically faster than the older IDE standard, but the bottleneck is usually the internal workings of the drive rather than the connection, so they are not much faster in the real world unless it is a high-speed drive.

If you want to upgrade an existing computer, your best bet is to choose a hard drive with the same connector as your existing one.

Answer 3

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...

Answer 4

SATA is a newer connection method for hard drives and optical drives. It operates at a much faster speed then IDE and allows you to enable RAID configurations.

The cables are also much more neat :)

Answer 5

These days SATA is normal.

SATA is the current standard way to connect internal drives (harddrives, DVD drivers, etc) to the motherboard.

It is replacing PATA (also known as IDE) and is faster and uses smaller cables.

Answer 6

You can disable the sata connection to the harddrive.then after cd-roms becomes unbootable